Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan: Not a Ball to Make
Written: Jun 29 '03
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Pros: eventually, yes, it can be a ball
Cons: not for the faint of heart or the new to decorating
The Bottom Line: This pan is not for beginners, but can add to your cake repertoire with enough practice.
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| pippadaisy's Full Review: Wilton 4 Piece Sports Ball Pan |
The Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan was the first three-dimensional Wilton pan that I added to my collection, and it was almost the last due to my inexperience with three-dimensional cakes. Let this review serve as a warning.
Why Four Pieces?
The first thing I'm sure anyone is asking is why on earth a pan to do a ball-shaped cake would involve four pieces. Well, unlike the majority of the other Wilton 3D pans, the Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan requires you to actually bake the cake in two pieces, which I will refer to as the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
The set consists of two half-globe pans, and two rings on which to set the pans as they are baking. Ostensibly, the rings keep the half-globes flat, but the first thing you are struck with is that it probably would have made a LOT more sense for Wilton to design the pan with an attached base so that you aren't trying to precariously balance a round cake pan on a thin metal ring in your oven. Even the addition of a cookie sheet doesn't seem to help much.
Using the Pan
As I've noted in other cake pan reviews, your best bet for the "grease and flour" portion of cake-baking is to use either the Wilton Cake Release product, or use something I've found called Baker's Joy which is aerosol, and works just as well. Traditional greasing and flouring hasn't been very successful for me with these pans, although the smooth texture of the Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan might be the exception. However, I have enough trouble with doing these cakes without worrying about the cake coming out of the pan.
The Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan takes one two-layer cake mix. The idea is that you set the half-globe pans on the rings, pour half the batter into each pan, and bake. The "ball" is created by frosting the two half-globes together like a layer cake.
Can This Actually Work?
The answer to the question "Can this actually work?" is yes, with a great deal of practice. The first ball-shaped cake I made was a veritable disaster, because I thought it would be a simple matter of just slapping some frosting in between the cakes and plopping the Northern Hemisphere onto the Southern. Boy, was I wrong.
First, unless you are capable of using a level in your oven, odds are the half-globe pans are at least a wee bit tipsy on their rings. This results in the cakes often being a bit uneven on the top side, which will affect the balance. So for starters, you need to either be able to level a cake really well with a knife, or invest in a cake leveler (and if you can see the beginnings of a conspiracy here, you aren't alone).
Secondly, I've discovered through trial and error that boxed cake mixes are really too light for putting together this cake. I've yet to even find a pound-cake alteration for a box cake mix that does the job, so I've resorted to making my own pound cake from scratch to provide a more sturdy consistency for assembling this cake.
Third (and another part of the conspiracy, I assure you) is that any of the sport ball designs seem to involve covering the cake with the Wilton star tip (Tip No. 16). Ordinarily, covering an entire cake doesn't bother me in the least, but the difficult part of frosting this cake is that it IS three-dimensional, so instead of holding your decorating bag in a steady position and piping out hundreds of stars, you are constantly trying to contort yourself to do the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere. The areas around the same latitude as Australia and New Zealand are particularly difficult, and I found myself resorting to getting a new tip, the triple star tip, which has a suggested retail of $2.49 and is one of the more expensive tips (another part of a conspiracy perhaps), in an attempt to decorate this cake more quickly and save my back.
My Solution
I've made several of these cakes now, and the best solution I've found so far involves relying more on ingenuity than the pan. I use the cake leveler to shave off the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere and "glue" it to the cake plate with the frosting. I also try to level the flat parts of the half-globes before removing them from the pan if at all possible (I've found that my pound cake recipe fills the pans a bit more than the box cake mixes, making this possible).
How They Could Have Fixed This
Wilton has a long and successful history with three-dimensional pans. I fail to understand why they couldn't have used the usual stand-up pan design with a heating core for this concept, or at the very least designed the pans with a fixed base instead of the separate rings for added stability and level baking.
Other Uses
The Wilton 4-Piece Sport Ball Pan does have other uses, of course. In addition to also using it for other round shapes (globes, planets, I've even done a fish), you can also use the half-globes flat for something like a caterpillar, which has a better success rate (and is a lot easier to put together!) than the three-dimensional balls.
Other Notes
This pan is very easy to clean, unlike pans with more detail like the character pans. I hand-wash all my Wilton pans, so I can't speak to how well it withstands dishwashing. I am, however, often concerned that I will lose the rings, so this is one cake pan that goes back into its original box to keep all the pieces together.
I'll add in here that this cake is designed to serve approximately 8-10 people. That's not a lot of pieces for a fair amount of effort, so that's something else you might want to take into consideration when deciding on this pan.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 9.99
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pippadaisy
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Divorce seriously cuts into the amount of time for reviewing.
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